All in all, Bundt felt his men acquitted themselves rather well. Though this was their first test under his command, most of the mercenaries had seen action many times before, for many different commanders. They fought not out of patriotism or any conviction for one sort of government over another, but 170.

out of greed. And Bruno Bottger was paying them very well indeed for their loyalty.

Most of the men carried Kalashnikov AK-47's, or the Chinese equivalents of them, and they poured a murderous fire into the defenders of the town of Luchitan.

A seaside port city, it wasn't built for defense from a land-based attack, most of its buildings being situated near the wharves and waters of the gulf, from which almost all of its citizens earned their meager livings.

Wisely, perhaps, the Mexican government hadn't wasted much equipment or manpower on such a small, unimportant village, so the defenders weremostly men and boys of the village who had little or no battlefield experience.

Nevertheless, they never gave up, but fought to the last man with a ferocity only those defending their homes could show. In the final event, the scouts and rangers of Bundt's force had to go door to door to root out the men who were fighting them. Bundt figured he lost more men to snipers than to the sandbagged outposts at the edge of the village.

By nightfall, all of the male inhabitants of Luchitan were dead or lying severely wounded in the streets. Most of the females were also, but the men had managed to capture quite a few. They shot the old and ugly ones, and saved the young, pretty girls for their nighttime entertainment.

As Bundt sat at a table in the mayor's office, where he'd set up his radio to contact the base at Villahermosa, he could hear the screams and pleas of the women as they were being beaten and raped repeatedly by the mercenaries.

He shook his head. Sometimes he felt this was what most of the men signed up for, rather than the money they were paid. Where else could you get a license to rape and pillage and be above any law other than G.o.d's?

Bundt was, on the other hand, a professional soldier, and he despised what was happening now in the town he and his troops had conquered. But he was also a realist, and he knew 171.

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if he tried to stop what the men were doing, he'd end up with a bullet in the back before the campaign was half over.

No, better to let the animals have their fun as a reward for their fighting. After all, he reasoned to himself, one couldn't win a war fighting with choirboys.

He keyed the radio on the frequency General Enrique Gonzalez had given him.

"General," he said when Gonzalez was on the line.

"Yes, Colonel Bundt."

"Luchitan is ours," Bundt said simply.

"And your losses?" Gonzalez asked.

"One Kiowa, and thirty troops."

"And Salina Cruz?"

"We advance on it tomorrow at first light," Bundt said.

"Good. Our men are having similar success. Perhaps it will not be as difficult as we thought to take Mexico City."

"Good night, General," Bundt said. He didn't bother to tell the man these faraway towns had been practically ceded by the Mexican government, and that the closer they got to the capital, the fiercer thefighting was going to be. The man ought to know, without me telling him, that the leaders of this country are not going to give up their positions of power, prestige, and wealth without a h.e.l.l of a fight, Bundt thought.

Bundt hung up the radio mike and leaned his head on the table. He was desperately tired, and smelled of cordite and gunpowder and blood and excrement. He wondered if he could find the energy to bathe before he ate supper.

He raised his head and saw a bottle of whiskey on the sideboard in the mayor's office. He got up, picked up the bottle, and walked slowly back toward his bunk in the next room.

"The h.e.l.l with eating," he muttered as he twisted the cap off the bottle and put it to his lips.

Perhaps if he drank enough, it would drown out the sounds of women's screams and the hoa.r.s.e shouts of men having their way with them.

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"Well," Mike Post said to Ben Raines, "it looks like the stuff has finally hit the fan."

Ben looked up from the papers on his desk. "You mean Perro Loco has started his move northward?"

Mike took the pipe out of his mouth. "Yeah. We have reliable reports his forces leveled the town of Cardenas just north of Villahermosa. Word is they left nothing in the town alive, not even the animals."

"Anything else?"

"Uh-huh. Our German friends have started a similar move on the western coast, taking out Luchitan and beginning an attack on Salinas Cruz on the Gulf of Tehuantepec."

"Any word yet on who their big man is?"

Mike nodded. "Yeah, and you're not gonna like it. Seems some of the natives in Brazil speak of a man with a thick German accent. They have a name for him in Portuguese which translates roughly as 'man with no face.' "

"No face?"

"Sounds like he's got some terrible burn scars that have left him without much expression."

"Burn scars, huh? I guess it could be our old friend Bruno Bottger after all."

"That certainly ties in with our team down there finding out they're working on BW. Bottger was always a fan of better killing through chemistry."

"What's the word on Jersey and Coop?"

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"The SEALs are taking the ship out to sea and are going to steam at full throttle toward us. Meanwhile, Doctor Buck is on the way down there in one of our Ospreys."

"But there's no place for an Osprey to land at sea," Ben said.

Mike grinned. "Buck wouldn't take no for an answer. He says he'll parachute into the sea and let the SEALs pick him up. He wants to see the cultures firsthand, and wants to make sure Jersey and Coop are getting the care they need."

Ben laughed. "Can you imagine Doc Chase doing that?" he asked. "There's something to be said about having a young hotshot as our medical officer."

Mike nodded. "And, best of all, Buck's no fool. He's having all the information he's gathered forwarded to Doc Chase at his quarters. He says there's no one else in the world with as much experience with BW as Lamar."

"We're going to need both of them if we're going to manage to get a vaccine in time for it to do any good."

"What about our plans for the U.S.?" Mike asked. "I've also gotten reports from Pat O'Shea and Dan Gray that Os-terman's troops are starting to move southward toward our borders."

Ben nodded and glanced at the reports on his desk. "Yeah, but no real battles yet, just some movements suggesting that Osterman plans to try and keep us busy so we won't have time to help Mexico if they ever ask us to."

"What's the Mexican president say?"

"The fool still thinks he can handle Loco by himself. I personally think he'll hold off asking for our help until they're knocking on his door .

. . and then it'll be too late to save Mexico City."

"So, we just sit and wait?" Mike asked.

"Oh, no. I've just sent Jackie Malone and a couple of hundred of our best scouts up to our northern border with the U.S. They're going to parachute in and start to play some 174.

games with Osterman on her own turf. I imagine she'll be plenty p.i.s.sed when Jackie starts raising h.e.l.l up there."

"Sounds like things are starting to get interesting. What are your plans personally?"

"I'm going to manage things from here for right now. When my team gets back, we'll decide where the hottest spot is, and then I'll go down there and see what we can do."

"Don't you think it's about time to heed Doc Chase's recommendation and stay out of the field?" Mike asked.Ben shook his head. "I'm not that old yet, Mike. And I hate being an armchair quarterback. I've got to be involved in the action to see how things are going."

Mike held up his hands. "Okay . . . okay, don't get your panties in a bunch."

Ben laughed. "Believe me, Mike, I'll know when it's time to hang it up."

Jackie Malone stood in the cargo bay of the big C-130 plane and looked behind her. Her second in command on this mission was a small man named Tiger Tanaka. He stood only five feet four and had a slim body that belied the muscles that rippled under his skin. He was an advanced sensei of several martial-arts schools, and was second to none in hand-to-hand combat.

He smiled at her as he put on the helmet that would allow him to breathe during the upcoming HALO drop. HALO stood for High Alt.i.tude, Low Opening, and was one of the most dangerous of all parachute drops. They would bail out at twenty thousand feet, encased in a fall body suit similar to the ones worn by scuba divers, with self-contained oxygen masks and alt.i.tude gauges strapped to their wrists. They wouldn't open their specially designed chutes until they were under five thousand feet, at which time they'd be falling at over 120 miles an hour toward the earth.

HALO flights were designed to drop combatants behind en- 175.

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emy lines, where the hang time in chutes had to be minimized so as to get the men on the ground before the enemy knew they were there.

Tiger gave Jackie a small nod, his grin magnified behind the Plexiglas of his oxygen helmet, indicating the men were ready for the drop.

Two hundred men were crammed into the cargo bay, and on the jump master's signal, they would all walk out the back of the plane and jump off a specially designed ramp that was to be lowered just before the jump.

Jackie tried to smile back, but her face wouldn't cooperate. She'd received a crash course in HALO jumps, but she'd never done one before and the truth was, she was scared s.h.i.tless. The idea of jumping out into the darkness, into air that was several degrees below freezing, and falling like a stone for what was surely going to seem an eternity, just didn't appeal to her at all.

Jackie was a control freak, and didn't like any situation in which she wasn't in complete control of her destiny. It was going to be hard to put her faith in the small alt.i.tude gauge on her wrist. If she was off in opening her chute by even twenty seconds, she'd end up splattered all over the countryside below.

The jump master stood beneath a red light at the end of the cargo bay, an intercom to his ear. When he got the word from the pilot, he flipped a switch turning the light from red to green, and the ramp at the rear of the ship lowered.He gave Jackie a thumbs-up, and she took a deep breath and stepped out into the darkness.

As she fell, she put her hands at her sides and her feet together and shot downward like an arrow toward the ground below. She counted to herself so as to know when to start looking at her alt.i.tude gauge, hoping she wouldn't wait too long.

Finally, she pulled her right arm up against the resistance of the air and glanced at the gauge . . . time to do it!

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Grasping the D-ring on her chest, she gave a yank. At first nothing happened, and she had time to think, "Oh, s.h.i.t! My chute didn't open."

Just as she was reaching for her backup chute cord, she felt as if she'd hit a wall as her chute opened and slowed her from 120 miles an hour down to ten in a couple of seconds. "d.a.m.n, it's a good tiling I double-tied my boots, or they'd have been jerked off," she thought, her heart hammering with relief as she slowed to what seemed like a crawl after the speed of her initial fall.

After discussion with Otis Warner and General Joe Winter, Ben Raines and Jackie had decided her group should parachute into eastern Iowa, between Cedar Rapids and Davenport. The area was mostly rural, with large expanses of rolling hills, few towns, and no Army bases of any size.

Best of all, it was only a few hundred miles from Indianapolis, where Claire Osterman had her headquarters.

Ben and Jackie felt they could sow the seeds of hate and discontent best, as well as be a major embarra.s.sment to Osterman, if they struck close to her main base.

Jackie hit the ground, and immediately curled into a ball and rolled, as the jump instructor had told her to. She ended up in a large field of some sort of maize, with plants growing to four feet in height. She rolled up her chute and kept her eye on the sky above her, as one of the main dangers with this many troops dropping was that one would land on your head if you didn't keep an eye out.

Slipping out of her jump suit and helmet, she immediately keyed a signal device on her shirt that would lead the others to her, so they could rendezvous in the dark.

As usual, Tiger Tanaka was the first to reach her. He had a Mini-Uzi on a strap around his neck, and held it at port arms as he turned in a small circle, making sure no one was around to give them any trouble.

Within an hour the entire force had congregated in the middle of the field.

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"Injury report," Jackie said to Tiger.

"We lost six men, three whose chutes malfunctioned, two who didn't open soon enough, and one who landed on a fence post," Tiger said in a calm voice."d.a.m.n!" Jackie said with feeling.

"That is a very acceptable ratio for a HALO drop, Miss Jackie," Tiger said.

She glanced at him. "Try telling that to the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who hit the ground at over a hundred miles an hour," she said. Jackie hated nothing more than losing any of her troops.

She knelt in the field and pulled out her map and compa.s.s. After studying them for a couple of minutes, she stood up. "All right, men, we head out south by southwest. We're only a couple of miles from Cedar Rapids. I expect us to be in control of the town by daylight."

Jackie sent squads out in a circular ring around the town. The first objective was to cut the town off from the outside world.

All telephone lines coming into the city were cut, and transformers were blown off their poles so that merely splicing the wires back together wouldn't resume service.

Next, the cellular microwave transmitting towers were dynamited, destroying the usefulness of any cell phones that might still be in use in the town.

After all communications, other than shortwave or CB radio, were halted, Jackie led a squad to take over the town's authority figures. Separate squads were sent to each police station as well as the mayor's and city council's offices.

Most of the police, when faced with commandos carrying Uzis and/or M-16's, gave up quietly. A couple who tried to resist were shot, but only one had to be killed.

By 0800, the town was in Jackie's hands. Roadblocks were set up on all roads leading into or out of the town, with her troops dressed as local policemen. The story used to turn away 178.

travelers was that there was a plague of unknown origin in the town and it had been placed in quarantine for the time being.

Interrogation squads began their work, ferreting out citizens who were sympathetic to the SUSA's aim to prevent another war with the U.S. These men and women were issued guns and allowed to resume some of the governmental functions of the city.

Jackie's plan was to delay face-to-face confrontation with the Army of the U.S. as long as she could. She wanted to take as many small towns and villages as possible before Osterman and her cronies knew they were under siege.

Once Cedar Rapids was secure, she left a token force to hold the town while she and the rest of her troops moved on to Davenport, a hundred miles closer to Indianapolis and Claire Osterman's home grounds.

The guerrilla war had begun.